So yesterday evening in real life and this morning via Facebook Messenger, I was chatting with my friend Ali about overpopulation and about whether it would be beneficial for humanity to have a designated population target. Regarding overpopulation, we agreed that it was moreso a contributing factor that exacerbates other issues on Earth rather than a problem per se. I didn't really get to finish finding out his reasoning for thinking that having a population target for Earth would be okay in a simulation but a poor idea in practice. I know it has to do with the path of implementing the idea as much as it has to do with the idea itself. For example, he seemed to think that if we could simulate a world where a population cap existed and everyone magically knew about a population cap, that it may be a good thing, but that if we actually tried to go from our current world to a future state where we had a widely-know population cap, then any process for reaching that state would be bad. I'm interested to have him read this and see to find out if it's an accurate approximation.

So, even assuming that devising a worthy path for implementing population targets is hard, Ali suggests that it is made even harder by the fact that many such successful paths are bad. Maybe they would be bad because they would be likely to insight conflict around the idea itself. This seems unlikely to me, since most people only fight about long held beliefs. New beliefs and ideas tend to be accepted or not without much violence. At any rate, devising a path for Earth to adopt a population target in the first place seems hard enough, so I would prefer to do that first and then adjust for any badness of it, rather than worry about its badness forthwith.

I guess the first step is to promote the idea of population targets for specific geographical areas generally, and then also for the entire Earth as a geographical area specifically. The first thing that comes to mind is to write a bunch of short stories about all the ways that having population targets could be bad. In other words, how could we poorly implement population targets, or how could we implement them in such a way that they were so inflexible as to become bad as context around them changed. The latter seems easy to avoid, but the former does not. Even avoiding the latter though requires some level of planning, and stories can be written about the failure thereof.